Software:Grace (plotting tool)

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Short description: 2D graph plotting software
Grace
Grace-screenshot.png
Preview of Grace-6, showing the Fourier transform dialogue
Original author(s)Paul Turner (Xmgr)
Evgeny Stambulchik (Grace)
Developer(s)Grace Development Team
Initial release1991 (Xmgr)
1998 (Grace)
Stable release
5.1.25 / 14 February 2015; 9 years ago (2015-02-14)
Preview release
5.99.1dev5 / 7 May 2007; 16 years ago (2007-05-07)
Written inC
Operating systemAny Unix-like
Available inEnglish
TypePlotting
LicenseGPL
Websiteplasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

Grace is a free WYSIWYG 2D graph plotting tool, for Unix-like operating systems. The package name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data." Grace uses the X Window System and Motif for its GUI. It has been ported to VMS, OS/2, and Windows 9*/NT/2000/XP (on Cygwin). In 1996, Linux Journal described Xmgr (an early name for Grace) as one of the two most prominent graphing packages for Linux.[1]

History

Grace is a descendant of the ACE/gr plotting tool (also known as Xvgr), based on Xview libraries from OpenWindows.[2] Xvgr was originally written by Paul Turner of Portland, Oregon,[3] who continued development until version 4.00.[4] In 1996, development was taken over by the ACE/gr development team, led by Evgeny Stambulchik at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.[5][6] Development of Xmgr was frozen at version 4.1.2 in 1998[3] and the Grace project was started as a fork, released under the GPL.[7] The name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data" or "Grace Revamps ACE/gr"[6] Turner still maintains a non-public version of Xmgr for internal use.[6] The first version of Grace was numbered 5.0.0 and the latest stable version, 5.1.25 (released February 2015).[2] Whether the development of the next major release 6.0.0 is still in progress is unclear. The latest preview versions numbered 5.99.* were released in 2007.[8]

Currently maintained versions

Noteworthy alternate versions of Grace include GraceGTK, forked from Grace 5.1.22 in 2009 by Patrick Vincent,[9] and QtGrace, released in 2011 by Andreas Winter. [10] Both of these versions of Grace work natively on Windows operating systems and had releases in 2017.

Features

Grace can be used from a point-and-click interface or scripted (using either the built-in programming language or a number of language bindings). It performs both linear and nonlinear least-squares fitting to arbitrarily complex user-defined functions, with or without constraints. Other analysis tools include FFT, integration and differentiation, splines, interpolation, and smoothing.[11]

Programs using Grace

See also

  • List of graphing software

References

  1. Vaught, Andy (1996-08-01), "Graphing with Gnuplot and Xmgr", Linux Journal, http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1218, retrieved 2009-06-19 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Stambulchik, Evgeny (1998–2000), Grace, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  3. 3.0 3.1 Stambulchik, Evgeny (1997), Xmgr, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  4. Paul J Turner and ACE/gr development team (1998-05-13), Xmgr: List of changes, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr/doc/CHANGES.html, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  5. ACE/gr development team (1998-05-10), Xmgr user guide: introduction, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Xmgr/doc/intro.html#copyright, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 Grace development team (2008-09-20), Grace user guide: "What is Grace?", http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/doc/UsersGuide.html#ss1.1, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  7. Grace development team (2006-05-08), Grace-6 Roadmap, http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/devel/roadmap-6.html, retrieved 2009-06-20 
  8. GraceGTK development team (2018-05-25), GraceGTK, SourceForge, https://sourceforge.net/p/gracegtk/home/gracegtk/, retrieved 2018-07-02 
  9. Winter, Andreas. "QtGrace". https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtgrace/. Retrieved 14 November 2018. 
  10. "Grace at NERSC". NERSC. Archived from the original on 24 February 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130224204701/http://www.nersc.gov/users/software/vis-analytics/grace/. Retrieved 15 February 2013. 

External links